Android: The notifications pane at the top of your Android phone's screen is a great and fast way to get to your notifications, but if you'd also like to see pop-up alerts over your lock screen for specific emails, SMS messages, or from certain apps, Notify Me gives them to you, and lets you control which notifications you see.

If the way Notify Me popup banners look is familiar, it should be: the developer behind the app took inspiration from the way Apple handles pop-up alerts on the homescreen. He wanted a similar effect, but he wanted to be able to control the apps that were allowed to notify him, and he wanted a way to quickly open or dismiss the alert from the lock screen. Notify Me does just that.

After installing, you can tell Notify Me which applications can push alerts to the lock screen as well as the notifications pane. If it's an SMS or an email, you'll see a snippet of text so you can read what the message has to say without opening the app or unlocking your phone. With SMS messages, you even get shortcut buttons to unlock and reply, mark the item as read, or unlock and call the contact immediately, right from your lock screen. Best of all, Notify Me doesn't replace the standard way you access notifications in ICS or Jelly Bean (as in, you can just drag down the notifications pane, even when the phone is locked) but since the app works for older versions of Android too, it gives everyone the flexibility to see all or just the important notifications right there on your phone when you turn it on.

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Notify Me is free, ad-free, open source (code and downloads available at Google Code), and available to download from XDA Forums at the link below.